UC Berkeley Recent Work Title Keeping Tabs Permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/8z2844w6 Author Lekach, Sasha J Publication Date 2016-06-21 License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 4.0 eScholarship.org Powered by the California Digital Library University of California Sasha Lekach UC Berkeley Graduate School of Journalism New Media Master’s Project Keeping Tabs May 10, 2016 Keeping Tabs Overview Cool things are happening on the Internet and you are missing out. Why? These cutting-edge digital projects -- interactive, immersive, or multimedia features -- aren’t collected in one place. They are all over: government agency websites, company ​ ​ ​ webpages, 360-degree videos and scattered throughout different sections on media ​ ​ ​ ​ ​ publications’ websites. Keeping Tabs is a newsletter that eliminates the fragmented nature of the web. I’m bringing a handcrafted, personal experience straight to inboxes with my voice, thoughts, choices, selections. This isn’t just a link dump. It’s curated. I’ve done the legwork and found these bigger projects in the sea of online content. There are tons of options for finding aggregating content. “Best of” and trending news newsletters abound and are having a resurgence. But most of these sites and newsletters primarily focus on writing and reporting -- which is still really important -- but I’m highlighting design, web packaging and new digital technologies that move the standard webpage and present information in a new and innovative way. I’m getting back to basics with idea that medium is the message. That through scrolling, clicking through images or plugging in your own school district a reader will ​ ​ engage more with the content, pay attention and hopefully stick around to understand the story or information. How We Got Here Keeping Tabs is a weekly email newsletter highlighting one to five recent multimedia websites or projects online with a common theme, format or topic. I collect and curate interactive content and share it in a short, digestible way through links, providing my analysis and my familiarity and expertise with new technologies and advances in online presentation. 1 Here’s what my first newsletter back in October looked like. I was calling my project “Sasha’s Selections” and using Wix to create a template: 2 I then moved over to Mailchimp and started playing around with different designs and templates. Here was my first Mailchimp newsletter that went out in December. Notice the intro paragraph, image heavy design (which was sending most of my emails straight to spam folders), two-column layout and issue name, data and icon at the top: 3 Coming up with a name for my newsletter was a major challenge and hurdle. It was hard to design, promote and talk about my project without a name. Finally in February my unnamed newsletter project was dubbed “Keeping Tabs.” This seemed fitting since most of my colleagues deep in digital media are constantly dealing with an overflow of tabs on their laptops and mobile browsers with saved stories and unread articles to eventually look through. One of my Trello lists, with my list of name ideas over the months: Once I had a name, the design of the newsletter started to change around this stronger identity. By the end of February, I decided to move the big blocks of text in the newsletter to the bottom of the page and keep things simple and graphic up top -- hopefully to draw people in. A suggestion from my colleagues and advisors led to a moving image GIF showing one of the websites I was highlighting prominently featured at the top. I also kept the page to one column instead of the split page I had been making in previous issues. Here’s what the redesigned newsletter looked like back in February (top). It has since changed in small ways (I now have a bulleted list; see middle image from April) and 4 will continue to get massaged, but for now I like the simplicity of the layout. The most recent May issue has my new logo on top: 5 6 7 The GIFs at the top of the newsletter have become a key way for my newsletter to standout from others, and it makes it much more dynamic -- which seems appropriate for the content I’m covering. Here’s a recent GIF example: I also have a web presence with a website I’m building out and social media pages on ​ ​ Facebook and Twitter to also disseminate, share, store and promote the material I put ​ ​ ​ together for the newsletter. The target audience for Keeping Tabs is journalists -- especially those in interactive, data visualization and visual departments. Other creative types, including news nerds, graphic designers, design and web junkies, media and communication folks, storytellers, advertisement designers, and any curious people will also benefit from subscribing. This grouping falls under “creative” and is part of a so-called “creative class.” Newsletters are a crowded field, both those with content entirely inside the emails (like Lenny Letter or theSkimm) or links and news roundups (Vox Sentences, The Ann Friedman Weekly, “Links I would gchat you if we were friends” from Washington Post writer Caitlin Dewey, The Week, USA Today). Many of these newsletters have loyal followers and a similar demographic I’m targeting. 8 Both Lenny Letter and theSkimm are intended to keep readers within the email (there are links, but the main meat of their newsletters can be read within email). Lenny Letter in under a year since launching has more than 400,000 subscribers who ​ ​ actually open the bi-weekly emails (the newsletter has a 65 percent open rate). TheSkimm, although a daily news-oriented rundown, has 3.5 million subscribers and ​ ​ just launched a paid app and calendar service (called Skimm Ahead). I checked in with a few editors of daily newsletters to get a sense of the world. At Vox, Dylan Matthews is one of the editors for the daily evening newsletter Vox Sentences. ​ ​ When the newsletter started, the team decided mornings were too crowded. They’ve had success with their end-of-day news round-up format. Matthews said they put the newsletter out through Google Sheets and collect and store links and stories through Google’s cloud-based services. As to the benefits of making a newsletter, he said writing and putting together the news overview "makes you a better and more situationally aware writer." Talking to The Quickkie editor Chris Miles, he had similar takeaways from his first ​ ​ year running a daily newsletter. He recommended using Crowdtangle to find, collect and aggregate top news and links from social media. He called Reddit a “place to uncover diamonds in the rough.” I’ve been reluctant to use that particular social platform since I’m not a native user, but it drives huge readership. Like Vox, Miles said The Quickkie, which was in beta until September 2015, uses a lot of free services through Google to organize and save links and stories. He said he’s going through a lot of content on his phone so he tries to keep his method of saving and collecting simple. As to newsletter engagement, Miles said with their quick news product they’ve found 75-80 percent of email opens happen before 10 a.m. So they try to send out the letter between 5 a.m. and 7 a.m. to maximize readership. Like Keeping Tabs, the newsletter’s next steps are getting ads and setting up media partnerships. Keeping Tabs is not a daily newsletter and not covering breaking news, but offers information that can be viewed and clicked at any point after the email is sent. The email intends for the audience to link out to the different sites and projects highlighted in each issue. My competitors are more link-oriented newsletters and weekly (instead of daily) publications. 9 Keeping Tabs is unique in finding and organizing interactive projects that are haphazardly found around the web and putting them in one place. There is no one place to find interactive, multimedia projects -- it’s all housed on disparate news websites or hidden in roundups of top stories (many of which are long narrative pieces with no interactivity.) I’m focusing on formatting, layout and digital techniques that often are kept behind the scenes, while content-focused journalism or writing is highlighted. An Ion Interactive study found (for content marketing) that interactive material was 93 ​ ​ percent effective at educating buyers and 88 percent effective at differentiating brands. That’s compared to 55 percent efficacy for static sites. There’s a demand to see something different online. Reading and viewing behavior online is fickle. Readers spend an average 15 seconds on ​ a webpage and don’t read much of what’s on a page. So these interactive, scrolling, ​ coming-at-you projects are grabbing people’s attention and even if they don’t read a piece they can easily play around on a site. There’s a stickiness to the work I’m connecting people to, and a pull to play and see what these sites do that look so different from “traditional” webpages. Back in 2013 the number one story on the New York Times website was a quiz. This was ​ ​ ​ ​ a simple interactive site created by the NYT that was personalized and took the ​ ​ findings of a bigger study and made it something everyone could be a part of. And it spread like crazy. That was more than two years ago and interactives have only gotten better since then. Thesis research from a Rochester Institute of Technology grad student found by ​ ​ examining interactive material from the New York Times and the Washington Post that ​ ​ ​ ​ rich content, in the form of maps, data visualizations and other digital tools, are becoming a bigger portion of online news content, whether standalone or part of a text piece.